An installation nightmare story
Posted Apr 25, 2003 15:17 UTC (Fri) by
grant (guest, #10894)
Parent article:
An installation nightmare story
Right, so there's lots of work underway along the lines of many of the
suggestions made here.
Basically, most of the infrastructure necessary exists, and it's now a
question of extending the set of described printers and getting all the
distributions to ship something that works (and ideally pretty much the
same thing). There's also (finally) a volunteer updating the Printing
HOWTO, and other work happening on the somewhat scattered docs at LinuxPrinting.org.
As for what exists and where it's going, there are three main parts:
- CUPS is the spooler with the best "user experience". This is Mike Sweet's
baby, and it's a good one; the kinks seem to be settling out, and it works well for a wide variety of uses. It's very plug-and-play for PostScript printers; non-PostScript devices are a bit tricker but also work well.
- Foomatic is the driver/printer data-driven glue thing some folks are suggesting. It is a large database which describes all known free software drivers and many printers, and includes tools to cross-frobnicate any pair of these and spit out a working configuration for several spoolers. It works really well in the one distribution that uses it as intended: Mandrake. The latest Red Hat and probably a few others ship a sort of CUPS-specific subset of the universe of cross-frobnicated printer/driver data; this too works fairly well. (ObDisclaimer: I am the original author of Foomatic).
It should be noted that almost all of this project is done by one guy - Till Kamppeter of Mandrake, who took over Foomatic
after I got busy. Tracking all the drivers and printers in the world is a huge, neverending, thankless task, and Till is seriously swamped. If anybody wants to help, pipe up!
- Gimp-Print (from Robert Krawitz et al) and HPIJS (from HP itself) are the leading inkjet drivers in town. There are, however, a whopping 200-odd free software printer drivers in the world. Few distributions ship them all; few printer manufacturers can be expected to ship the necessary dozen compile permutations necessary. We still have no good solution beyond kicking distributions to ship all drivers and provide frequent updates.
Anyway, if you're wondering how to improve things, these are the projects
to volunteer for...
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